Sultan’s Palace: A Party That Ended In Death (Ep 74)

Before we get to the mysterious stranger, we need to understand the place where the story is supposed to have happened because the actual story of the 716 Dauphine Street is surprisingly well-documented.

You can find it.

And the building standing there was actually constructed in the 1830s by Joseph Coulon Gardette, a dentist who had come to New Orleans from Philadelphia and had become successful enough to build himself this impressive house.

And Historic New Orleans Collection View: Carré Surveys records the building as having been constructed in 1836 by a builder named Frederick Roy, and the Library of Congress also preserves photographs and architectural documentations of the LePretre mansion at this address.

So this house is a large one.

It has three and a half story masonry building, and is one of the features that makes it particularly striking.

It's there, the ornate ironwork that surrounds the upper levels, and those galleries were added around 1850, and it transformed what the originally much have been more severe Greek revival structure into this elaborate building that people associate with the house today.

Joseph Gardette did not keep the property for very long, and in April of 1839, three years after he, he constructed it, he sold it to Jean Baptiste LePretre, a wealthy merchant and a banker who became the man most closely associated with the building in the historical record.

LePretre owned the property for decades, and according to the property records preserved by the Historic New Orleans Collection, he and his family occupied the house for nearly half a century before the property was taken over by the Citizens Bank of Louisiana in 1878 following legal proceedings involving LePretre.

That is the history that we actually have documented.

There is no mysterious sultan.

There is no massacre.

There is no royal household, no unexplained phenomena disappearance.

Instead, we have a wealthy New Orleans family living in this important house during 19th century in a city that was changing rapidly, but there is one detail that becomes extremely important later.

The property at the corner of Dauphine and Orleans Street was there long before the present mansion was built.

And the Historic New Orleans Collection property records trace ownership of the lot back to the 18th century.

In 1783, the records describe a house on the corner owned by Victoire Dutillet, described in the record as a free woman of color.

That earlier house was made partly of wood and partly of brick, and it was obviously not the imposing mansion that stands there today, of course, and this means that the location itself was much older than the history of the current building.

And that matters because it gives us a possible explanation for one of the most confusing aspects of this legend.

The story can be attached to a location that existed before the mansion did.

Okay.

And people can remember that something supposedly happened at the corner of Dauphine and Orleans Street without necessarily remembering which building stood there at the time.

And over generations, the location can remain while the architecture change because the story will stay and the house will change.

And eventually, people began telling the story as if the current house was always there, and that appears to be exactly the kind of thing that happened with the story of the Sultan Palace.